Many merchants, such as small business owners of food trucks, farmers market stands, mom-and-pop stores, to-go food shops, etc., have no dedicated staff or have limited staff to handle customer payments. As a result, merchants often have to stop what they are doing, such as handling food in order to take credit card payments from customers. A typical process is:
1. Stop preparing food
2. Take off the gloves
3. Take credit cards from customers
4. Swipe each credit card using a card reader
5. Wait until each transaction is complete
6. Put gloves back on and continue handling food
Point-of-Sale (POS) software and hardware are available that adapt merchants' smart phones and tablet computers into credit card acceptance devices. Mobile wallet solutions are also available that configure consumers' smart phones into payment instruments. Many of these solutions rely on special hardware capabilities, such as near field communication (NFC®) or require tight integration between the consumer payment instrument and merchant payment acceptance device.
Handsfree is an adjective describing equipment that can be used without the use of hands (for example, via voice commands) or, in a wider sense, equipment which needs only limited use of hands, or for which the controls are positioned so that the hands are able to occupy themselves with another task (such as driving) without needing to hunt far afield for the controls.